Profile of B. Rosemary Grant.

Abstract

Charles Darwin viewed evolution as a process so slow that it often evokes images of changes accumulated over near-geologic timescales. Rosemary Grant's research has revealed otherwise. Through painstaking documentation of the evolutionary process first described by Darwin, Grant has shown that evolution can be observed within a lifetime. Grant, an evolutionary biologist at Princeton University and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, has traced the evolution of Darwin's finches—14 species of songbirds of the genus Geospiza that inhabit the storied Galapagos islands of South America. For nearly four decades, Grant and her husband, Peter Grant, have followed the finches’ fate on the famous archipelago, furnishing proof for a biological process no less fundamental than natural selection. Their work lent the narrative spine to The Beak of the Finch, a Pulitzer Prize-winning account of their adventures in the archipelago written by the journalist Jonathan Weiner.